#stervis??? wtf no?? and then i limp over to google like a shot deer and go ���� ? help? and google kindly offers me the word zeester
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"but how do you watch something accidentally with french subtitles?" you may ask, and i may tell you that it's simple, because i love english, english is fun and versatile and incredibly useful in this world, but listening to some dutch music recently reminded me how much consuming dutch art for a change feels like doing stretches for my brain (i don't really notice what i'm missing out on if i don't do it, but it feels SO good when i do), and that had me pondering once again how to incorporate some german into my diet in a natural way, because if dutch is my language, then german belongs to people i love, german is the one used to tell family stories, german is a language that feels like home but that i use so little it always takes a few days of just listening before i remember how to speak without feeling like an idiot, and so i thought to myself, well, i know bad buddy has a whole list of subtitle options, and perhaps i can pull off a really neat trick here and get my fill of german while also spending some time with thai (with which i am having a torrid love affair this year) through a show i know almost by heart at this point, because i can process the german fast enough to still be able to listen to what i'm hearing (the spoken thai), and then as a bonus, i'd get to sidestep english entirely for a few brief but glorious moments, which is a thing so rare it's almost unheard of, and that would just be a win-win-win. however! it turns out german is not one of the many, many languages offered on youtube as a subtitle option for bad buddy (which is of course fine because in a grand way, truly, why would it). and they do happen to have french, which i then of course had to click just for fun almost as a joke just to see it play for a minute or so and definitely not any longer than that, and as it turns out, on a practical is-this-doable-for-me level french in this context worked out way better than i thought it might, which is why i got sucked in immediately, easily fascinated as i am. but this is also a language that has me reading just slowly enough that it takes all my attention to have any hope at staying caught up with the speed of the dialogue, which amounts to a situation that is, you know, not making me feel much closer to my german grandmother (or making me feel very much at all for that matter, because on the whole i have a deeply impersonal relationship with french), but that IS very unexpectedly making me think fondly of my high school french teacher who once wrote under an assignment that he really hoped i'd choose to do something with languages. and this is probably not what he meant, but i suppose i am doing that, yes. both by choice and because i stumbled and tripped and now i've watched several episodes of a french subtitled thai show in an attempt to find german input because i was listening to dutch music.
#the other thing i'm doing with languages is going fuck. shit. goddammit. what's the word for starfish in dutch#stervis??? wtf no?? and then i limp over to google like a shot deer and go 🥺 ? help? and google kindly offers me the word zeester#and then i'm like huh. i know thai goes the english route (plaa dao! literally fish+star) and starfish vs. seastar is ALMOST the same thing#but it also crucially isn't. this thing is not a fish. that's wrong. it's a star of the sea! i think the dutch have got it right here#and then i go through a list of languages and start tallying which side of this debate i just made up they come down on#and this is an incredibly biased line up but you know what. zeester. seestern. étoile de mer. estrella de mar. stella marina.#i feel less confident in claiming things like морская звезда and søstjerne but as far as i can tell they're in this camp too#sorry to the english but you really ARE the odd one out here in europe. what are you DOING. we all agree this thing is not a fish#< and crucially i go through all of this and THEN i end up on the english wikipedia page for starfish#which opens with the words (imagine a long pause here for dramatic effect)...... 'Starfish or sea stars'#sea stars!! i've never heard that used but hey. i guess all hope is not lost for you english.#she's a little confused but she's got the sea star#*
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